This Super Mario 64 Speed Run Will Blow Your Mind

No tool assisted runs in this bad boy. Skill-based gamer Elmo Nitoushin took to YouTube – after displaying his skills in real-time on Twitch.tv – and unleashed a 120 star Mario 64 speed run that will blow your mind.

Not everyone has the ability to throw cheats to the wind and care to the cowards, but some of them can manage to do just that and pull off a feat that will leave some YouTubers saying...

It's not just that this is a speed run based on the ability to get 120 stars in just two hours, it's that this speed run contains some of the most off-the-wall (literally), controller-damaging button combinations that you will ever see performed in an N64 game.

It's crazy just trying to piece together the kind of calculus-level mental gymnastics required to think up some of the antics displayed in the video. I mean, who grabs a bomb and glitches through the gates? Where does that even come from?

Just beyond the five-minute mark we see Elmo rolling out some acrobatic, mountain-leaping jumps, rolls, flips and grabs that would make Spider-Man blush with envy. How he gets from the top of the mountain to the penguin's house is impeccably brilliant (and dangerously precise). The speed race down the snowy course is all standard fare, but grabbing two stars in one run still boggles my mind.

But it's not just in the snowy tundras of an ice mountain did Elmo perform impossible feats. The Dire Docks sees the man with the same name as the Sesame Street star performing equally impossible odds to grab multiple stars in one run. It's just an insane feat of wrist, hand and finger action the likes of which you would have to classify in a category all its own.

One of the thing that impresses me most about this run – and it's something I've struggled with at all times when playing Mario 64 – is how on Earth did Elmo gauge the 3D depth and distance when making some of those jumps? While I love that N64 launch title, it was still an extremely frustrating game at times due to the fact that the perspective and camera weren't always in agreement with where I was trying to get the pudgy little plumber. This issue was obviously fixed in subsequent releases – mostly notably in Super Mario Galaxy and Galaxy 2 – but it's still something that amazes me when I see Elmo perform those leaping feats as if it's nothing. True skill, right there.

Elmo has a number of other videos in his YouTube library that might interest you, if you're in the mood to watch them. I don't think they really compare to his 120 star speed run in Super Mario 64, though.